Our next destination was Katherine in the Northern Territory and we set off through the Kimberly range in the morning, planning to stop at Kununurra for a couple of nights along the way. The trip was once again a feast for the eyes as we wound our way through the mountains, eventually emerging onto flatter terrain. This stretch of road was more heavily forested than anywhere we had been so far with swathes of gum trees either side of us, creaking in the still afternoon sunlight. Their bark looked like the peeling white paint on an old shed door. Greys, browns and whites smearing their gnarled trunks, leading them to appear as timeless as the ancient landscape upon which they stood.

Accompanying the increasingly verdant scenery were more bush creatures than we had so far seen. Wallabies hopped among the trees. A family of emus stood in the road ahead of us, not caring that we wanted to pass them by. An echidna scurried urgently across the asphalt in front of the van.

Echidnas are also known as spiny anteaters and are monotremes meaning that they belong to the order of egg-laying mammals. There are four species which along with the platypus, are the only surviving members of that order and are the only mammals that lay eggs. Although their diet consists largely of ants and termites that is about all that they have in common with anteaters. They are no more closely related to the anteaters of the Americas than to dogs, human beings, or indeed any other placental mammal.

Unique to Australia and a few of its surrounding islands, monotremes are one of the many unusual species which have been isolated on the island continent for a vast period of time. This isolation from their ancestral peers has led to the monotremes forming a wholly new and very different branch on the evolutionary tree.

To show just how different an echidna is from the hedgehog that it resembles, I will outline a few of its more interesting traits.

How cute is this guy?

They are covered with hair and spines. Their snout doubles up as a mouth and a nose. The tip of their snout is covered with electrosensory nerves allowing them to sense nerve impulses, static electricity and magnetic fields. A male echidna has four penises. Four. Penises. Two of these he uses to fertilise the female egg, inserting them into her double barrel vagina. I’m not making this up. The female will then lay the fertilised egg directly into her pouch where it is incubated until her puggle is born. A puggle is a baby echidna. As if they needed a stupid name like puggle when they already have quadratic bell-ends. During its infancy the puggle is weaned on its mothers milk patches. Pedictably, echidnas don’t have nipples, instead they have two areas of skin which “sweat” milk until the puggle is old enough to fend for itself.

Oh, and its genitals look like a fingerless baby hand.

After almost a days drive, we arrived on the edge of Kununurra, a relatively large town made prosperous by the surrounding fruit farms. We found a campsite and settled ourselves down beneath the lengthening shadow of a baobab tree.

The great wide trunked and spindly branched baobab tree, although an iconic image of Western and Northern Australia, is thought not to be a native Australian species. Mainly found in East Africa there are two prevailing theories as to how it arrived there. The first is that boabab nuts, the sweet smelling fruit of the boabab tree, were washed over from Africa across the Indian Ocean. This kind of migratory seeding is know to have happened elsewhere in the world, for example in the seeding of the volcanic pacific islands. However the distance involved seems far too great for this to be a plausible explanation. The second, and in my opinion more plausible theory is that the fruits were brought over to Australia by the Dutch, who traded them with the local aboriginal people before the continent was officially discovered by Captain James Cook on 19 April 1770.

Evidence of the Dutch discovering the continent is visible in the form of sixteenth century maps which appear to accurately depict the coastline of North and Western Australia. More tangibly it can be seen in the form of the blonde haired aborigines in the same region. Where did that gene come from, I wonder?! For a more detailed and scientific argument for and against this theory, try this page.

Many highly publicised theories abound as to ancient civilisations discovering, then forgetting about this land aeons ago. Egyptians, Arabians, Sumerians, Romans, Greeks, Libyans, Phoenicians, Asian Indians, Chinese, American Indians, Mayans, Vikings and Polynesians have all been suggested. The continent again appears on a number of maps left behind by these cultures.

As the sun set behind the hills, we sat drinking cold lager from the electric refrigerator we had purchased in Broome and eating pasta. Kangaroos and wallabies, feeling bolder with the descent of dusk begun to hop silently around the campsite and we watched them until the darkness and the beer clouded our vision and we retired to bed in the back of the van.

In the morning we popped in to town to buy some food and supplies. The town was pleasant, prosperous but unspectacular and so after a lunch of hand made sandwiches from the bakery we returned to the campsite where we could relax under the baobab tree or take a swim in the pool.

Having gotten thirsty in the afternoon sun, Faye decided to drink from one of the stand pipes dotted around the campsite. Putting her head beneath the tap she opened her mouth and twisted the valve. Nothing happened. Then with a scream she leaped away as a huge huntsman spider dragged his bulging, bulbous, thorax out of the tap and scuttled off across the grass, instantly unblocking the opening, allowing the water to flow forth.

Male huntsmen can attain a legspan of 10-12 inches although this only applies to certain species and is by no means the norm. As with all spiders, they use venom to demobilise or digest prey, but they are not deadly to healthy humans and are even said to be notably affectionate pets.They do bite but only if provoked, which can be said about a lot of people in my local pub. The victim will suffer only minor swelling and localised pain, and will recover in a day or two. Sometimes resembling the tarantulas of the americas, huntsman spiders can generally be identified by the shape and directionality of their legs, which, rather than being jointed vertically relative to the body, are twisted in such a way that they extend forward in a fashion more commonly seen in crustaceans. Most huntsman spiders are dull shades of brown or grey and their legs are covered with fairly prominent spines, but the rest of their bodies appear smooth. They are usually found in sheds, garages and other infrequently-disturbed places.

After a dip in the pool we sat and watched the stunningly beautiful cockatoos. The common white ones were there, ubiquitous as always to the Australian landscape, but this time they were joined by jet black ones with flashes of scarlet in their tail.

As we sipped on a couple more cold beers and watched the sun slide behind the green hill in front of our camping spot, we sat, watching and waiting for the wallabies and kangaroos of the night before to come quietly out of the bush and begin their nocturnal grazing once again.

The Kimberley region of North Western Australia is home to the delightfully named Bungle Bungle mountains and is famous for its breathtaking scenery. I had seen a lot of the area on television watching my old friend Les Hiddins the “Bush Tucker Man” as he traveled around the region. Now it was my turn to see it for myself. I had been particularly looking forward to this part of the trip. The vistas are like nowhere else on earth. The Kimberly region is uniquely identifiable with its deep red bluffs, green hills and mountains. On our way to Katherine we wound our way through the narrow valleys, seeing kangaroos, wallabies and parakeets in abundance.

We stopped for petrol at a small roadhouse operated by a local aboriginal community. While we waited for the attendent to fill the car up we chatted with one of the locals who told us how his tribe were lucky because aboriginal people in the Kimberleys had been able to keep most of their lands and so were still able to lead a relatively traditional life. He explained how important it was that the old ways were not lost although he was worried that the younger members of the tribe wanted to leave and head for the big cities where they would find life very difficult.

I will elaborate further on this later, but aboriginal people in Australia do face many problems in the larger settlements. I found that this was not so much the case in W.A. but certainly in Darwin, Adelaide and Sydney there are a disproportionate number of itinerant aboriginal people, many with serious alcohol and mental health issues. This is caused by a number of different factors such as the poor integration of “black fellas” and “white fellas” during the initial European colonisation of Australia, the forced merger of vastly different cultures and a natural intolerence of alcohol.

We continued for a few more hours before arriving in Fitzroy Crossing an eerie place in that it looks like any other small outback town but there are crowds of aboriginal people wandering around or just sitting in the shade but almost entirely in silence. Even the general store was virtually silent. And the dog food section was just a chest freezer filled with severed kangaroo tails. I shit you not.

Fitzroy Crossing and the lands and valleys around it were the home for a number of Aboriginal language groups. When Fitzroy Crossing was established the main group was the Bunuba People, their land stretching from the present day Brooking Springs and Leopold Downs Station to the Oscar, Napier and King Leopold Ranges. The Bunuba are the River and Hill people.

Another group in the area stretching on the other side of the Fitzroy River from GoGo, Fossil Downs and Louisa Downs Station and on either side of the Margaret River, are the Gooniyandi People. The plains Aboriginal people are the Nyigina and further south are the Walmakarri, the people of the Great Sandy Desert.

We had come here to visit the famous Geike Gorge, an ancient coral reef that had somehow ended up hundreds of miles inland, now overlooking a river infested with freshwater crocodiles.

Along with Tunnel Creek and Windjana Gorge, Geikie Gorge is part of an ancient barrier reef that developed during the Devonian Period.The walls of the gorge are 30 metres high.The eight kilometer gorge was created by the flowing waters of the Fitzroy River, which still flows through the region.

The remnants of the ancient reef

We spent the day on a very informative and enjoyable boat trip along the river and through the gorge itself before retiring for the night on the campsite outside the Fitzroy Crossing Hotel. While there we met a very strange character from Brixton of all places. He had apparently turned up on foot having just bought some marijuana from somebody, (God knows who he got it from that far out in the outback) before panicking and jumping out of the car. He appeared to have left a part of his brain somewhere in a field in Hampshire but entertained us with anecdotes about his days as a punk in London in the 1970’s for the rest of the evening. I’m still not certain what he was doing in Fitzroy Crossing, and I’m not convinced that he was either. He didn’t seem to be a tourist, or a resident. It was almost like he’d come to Australia years ago and just got lost.